CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Protecting forests and burying
greenhouse gases are key ways of slowing world climate change,
Norway's prime minister said on Friday a day after the Nordic
nation set a stiff 2030 goal of becoming "carbon neutral."

Jens Stoltenberg, in South Africa on a stopover before a
weekend trip to Antarctica, said about half the world's
emissions of greenhouse gases came from deforestation and from
burning fossil fuels in power plants and industries.

"Forestry and carbon capture are key to solving the climate
problem," he said in a speech in Cape Town of Oslo's strategy
for slowing climate change that the U.N. Climate Panel says
will bring more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising seas.

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Norway's parliament agreed on Thursday to make the world's
number five oil exporter "carbon neutral" by 2030, 20 years
earlier than previously planned. Under the scheme, any
emissions of carbon dioxide in 2030 will be offset by cuts
elsewhere.

Costa Rica and New Zealand are among few countries that
have similarly stiff goals to cut their net emissions to zero.

Stoltenberg said deforestation accounts for about 20
percent of total greenhouse gases -- trees soak up carbon
dioxide when they grow and release it when they rot or are
burnt.

Greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels such as coal or
oil in power plants and factories account for almost 30
percent. These could be dealt with by new technologies to
capture the gases and pipe them into underground stores, he
said.

"There's a long way to go but the potential is there," he
told Reuters of burying carbon.

DEFORESTATION

A U.N. climate conference in Bali last month agreed to
launch pilot projects to grant poor countries credits for
slowing deforestation under a new long-term climate pact beyond
2012. Norway said it would contribute $500 million a year.

But, unlike Norway, few industrialized nations are arguing
that their own forests should be included. Nordic forests are
expanding, partly because global warming itself is extending
the northern growing season.

Stoltenberg said inclusion of forests would benefit
Norway's own accounting for emissions. Norway's annual
emissions, from sources ranging from oil platforms to cars,
exceed 50 million tonnes and well above goals set by the U.N.'s
Kyoto Protocol.

"If forestry were included then the accounting changes.
Suddenly Norway's emissions are not 50 million tonnes but much
lower," he told Reuters.

South Africa's Environment Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk
also said that the United States, the world's top emitter,
should do far more to curb its emissions after agreeing in Bali
to negotiate a new world climate treaty by the end of 2009.

"The United States' commitment to join negotiations is an
important step forward. But it remains a first step -- an
infant step," he said in a speech. "What we expect from them is
a quantum leap."

He said that the United States, at a meeting of major
emitters in Honolulu in late January, should agree to deep
cuts.

"There is no way that the rest of the world will accept
that four percent of the world's population is responsible for
25 percent of the world's emissions," he said, referring to the
United States.